The Eco-Schools pack supports the South African National Curriculum Statement in which it suggests that all subject teachers who are teaching a particular phase should develop a
learning programme for the whole phase for the following year to ensure progression from grade to grade within the phase. This planning work (i.e. to plan a year’s activities in advance) is equally relevant to the Namibian context, although the same curriculum is not being used. The pack suggests that the subject teacher should complete a set of learning, teaching and assessment activities for a particular class, which can consist of a single activity or several activities spread over a few days or number of weeks. The pack further recommends that the lesson plan should be compiled by each individual teacher in the particular phase. The lesson plans are developed to explore the needs identified in the learning programme and the Eco- Schools toolkit suggests learning actions that would help achieve this (see appendix 7 and 8). Through such an exercise the Eco-Schools programme does not necessarily expect teachers to do a lot of extra work, but rather to integrate the environmental learning activities into the curriculum, across different subjects.
It is a known policy requirement for all South African and Namibian schools that environmental health and environmental care is a cross-curricular issue that should be
integrated into all subjects or Learning Areas. Within the Eco-Schools programme there are a number of possible Eco-Schools practices and activities, as outlined in the discussions above. Besides this, the Eco-Schools programme has the additional goal of encouraging and enabling the integration of environmental topics into lessons, as discussed above. To further support this, model lessons are provided for each school subject on the main Eco-Schools themes, e.g. water, school grounds etc. With this level of support, one would expect Eco-Schools teachers to be willing to include environmental themes into their lesson plans, because of the
supportive climate and culture favoring environmental concerns.
At most of the upper primary schools I observed, especially in the Namibian schools, teachers who do not teach science subjects are not interested in integrating environmental issues into their subject teaching. The support for integrating environmental issues into subjects seemed stronger at the lower primary level. The resistance to this integration had varying causes and elements. In one school the resistance seemed to be largely a question of poor timing and inadequate understanding of the goals of Eco-Schools and once these items were addressed, support for integration emerged; as explained by teacher 7:
At the beginning of the yearI think the other teachers were more concerned with their own classrooms and their own learning programmes they weren’t involved initially, but within this third term particularly, I have told them that for us to be recognised as an Eco-School we need to be far more integrated and our curriculum teaching should be better integrated than ever before… Since I have explained the reason to the teachers they have all started coming together to discuss and suggest things that they can do. ... I am (now) finding that more and more teachers understand and they have been very supportive now.
In another school the Eco-Schools coordinator expressed her frustration that despite all the effort she had put into the program in terms of educating the teachers to understand the Eco- Schools concepts she has still a problem with the educators who don’t really like to integrate environmental education activities in their teaching, which she regards as a problem for her. She went on to explain that:
The teachers think that when we are talking about environmental education in Eco- Schools then they think that it is something added on top of what they are already doing. Teachers don’t think that environmental education is an extension or a continuation of topics and activities that they are usually doing. The teachers do not
want to recognise that current teaching policy is to integrate themes and topics into teaching which is…. expected from all teachers.
In a third example, the Eco-Schools coordinator (teacher 1) explained that the problem lay in the subject teachers in say Science and Agriculture not recognizing the links between
elements of their subject, such as water, and its environmental relevance.
The availability of model environmental lessons for different subjects in the Eco-Schools pack is intended to make just such links. This was highlighted by three of the Eco-Schools coordinators. The first emphasized how this made lesson planning easier:
Eco-Schools is bridging a wide gap that long existed between educators and what the department of education provides. Eco-Schools is an initiative that actually provides ideas on lesson plan development and how to (create) extra curriculum activities … and make it environmental friendly activities (Teacher 8).
The second stressed how these lessons and the Eco-Schools activities helped broaden teacher understanding of environmental matters for their teaching:
The Eco-Schools programme is so fantastic that it makes the educator’s job that much easier, because it become more fruitful to work with and to have a better
understanding themselves of the environment than before. The teachers can now actually impart broader knowledge to learners (Teacher 8).
The third stressed how the Eco-Schools cluster workshops were based on research by the teachers on the use of lesson plans and this was assisting teachers:
As Eco-Schools teachers we do research on related topics from the syllabus and prepare a lesson plan based on the theme that we are teaching like the workshop that we organised at our school in which we invited Grahamstown cluster schools to come learn from our research on medicinal plants that took place on the 10 September 2007. Portfolio 3 showed how learners were participating in, and working in the herbal and
vegetable garden with pleasure but the portfolio did not indicate how teachers integrate these activities into their subject teaching. The portfolio also referred to other teachers who are doing school ground duties as separate from the teachers in the garden, and there was no clear indication of how this was linked into their subject based teaching, and the different subjects. Similarly, in portfolio 2 there was no mention of teachers working together in integrating the phase teaching, in this case the foundation phase teaching, or how the different subjects were
used for environmental learning. Portfolio 4 indicated a scenario in which the teachers of grade 6 and 7 planned their activities together. It showed that the grade 6 learners focussed on making boats from waste materials as a class, while the grade 7 learners focussed on handling data from paper recycling competition, which was seen as a progression of activities from one level to the next. There was also a clear link between these activities and the Learning Area requirements for content and progression. Portfolio 1 also showed evidence of integration of environmental learning into more than one Learning Area. From this evidence it is clear that not all teachers participating in the Eco-Schools programme are equally involved in
integrating environmental learning into the different Learning Areas or subjects in the schools, showing a limited understanding and uptake of the cross-curricular intent of environmental education.
4.5 SUPPORT FOR LEARNING ENGAGEMENT IN ECO-SCHOOLS